Paul E Nelson presenting at Cascadia Poetry Festival 8, photo by Leszek Chudzinski
Paul Nelson’s ongoing honing of the Day Song poetry event has produced some of the most lively and consequential verse of our time. How else write about the calamities and demands and mental/emotional/political consequences of the materialist apocalypse upon us, than an ongoing poesis of awareness and participation the anti-form the Day Song provides? Truly a praxis of proprioception and of Olson’s demand to “keep it moving…
– Sharon Thesen, Cascadian Poet/Scholar from B.C.
David McCloskey on Cascadia, Part 2
David McCloskey is a retired Professor of Sociology at Seattle University, and founder of the Cascadia Institute. I got the chance to interview him on October 30, 2013, at his home in Eugene,...
Wanda Coleman, Dead at 67
I was the emcee one year at the Bumbershoot Literary Arts stage, 1999, back when that stage and the small press fair was the unofficial kickoff of the Seattle literary arts season. After a short...
David McCloskey on Cascadia
After hearing about the concept in bioregionalism (in about 1991 or so) and getting interested in an organizing effort that went deeper than politics, I created the Cascadia Poetry Festival in March...
Morris Graves Residency Report
I am just back from the best and most intensive writing retreat/ residency of my life and a quick trip to L.A. to visit José Kozer (& his wife Guada), see Amalio Madueño, meet Pablo Baler (&...
Community Self Reliance (Michael Shuman)
The seeds for a bioregionalist perspective in me were planted by the late Peter Berg of the Planet Drum Foundation during an interview I conducted around 1993, but the interview I am posting today...
Habib Audio, Interview and Postcards
My posts on the August 2013 Seattle visit of Morrocan poet and Beat scholar El Habib Louai were quite long, (archived here) so I am creating this post in the hopes that viewers of this blog will...
All 2013 Postcards
I have posted all my 2013 POstcard POems in one spot. See: https://wp.me/P1Xnkd-1h7. For more on the fest, see: https://poetrypostcards.blogspot.com/ For the postcard fest Facebook...
A Little History: The Deeply Personal as Political
(This essay was recently published in Zen Monster.) (download pdf for best formatting) A Little History: The Deeply Personal as Political (Some notes on a book by Ammiel Alcalay) There were two...
Brenda Hillman at Open Books, Sunday 10.27.13
Brenda Hillman reads at Open Books tomorrow at 3p and I first met her at Open Books in 2010, I think it was. She has just completed her tetralogy of meditations on the elements, ending up...
93. The Fog Wet Web
Who could resist the term meteorologist Cliff Mass is using for this deeply socked-in fog situation we find ourselves cutting through here in Seattle? Fogmageddon. Not me. Combine that with the...
Rattlecast #54 (Watch the Interview)
Back in March before we had a sense of how COVID-19 the novel Coronavirus would change our lives forever, Rattle Magazine's Tim Green invited me to sit down (via Skype) for an interview about my...
Buckminster Fuller
As a fan of the Black Mountain School of poetry, which was inspired by the revolutionary poetics of Charles Olson, the last rector of the famed outside educational institution in North Carolina in...
Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House (Review)
A very astute review of a new book by a poet that MANY poets love to hate has been published. It's a book by Kent Johnson called Because of Poetry, I Have a Really Big House. The reviewer is Norman...
How does one make literary art about this time in history that avoids rhetoric and facile political positioning in this era of the spectacle? How does one avoid being consumed by the simultaneous collapse of so many systems — some being eviscerated by people in positions designed to protect such systems? Deborah Poe has some idea based on her submission to the upcoming anthology Winter in America (Still.
Deborah is the author of several books of poetry including keep, Elements, and Our Parenthetical Ontology, as well as a novella in verse, Hélène. Her visual works–video poems and handmade book objects–have been exhibited throughout the US. She lives on stolen Coast Salish land, specifically the ancestral homeland of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot People.
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